Georgia Nicolau, Santos, Brazil:

“I want everyone to be armed! That the armed people will never be enslaved”

Where do we start?

The title is a phrase said by the genocide president Bolsonaro, in a meeting with ministers in the middle of the pandemic with now more than 20.000 people dead by covid 19 in brazil. During the meeting, not a single a word about the disease. 

YouTube channels in Brazil with fake news have almost three times more views than networks with true information, according to a study done by the University of São Paulo.

The pandemy made the Brazilian tragedy even more evident. There is a lack of housing, basic sanitation, food security. Racism abounds, violence against women. The majority of people dying  are the known to brazilians social and economical indicators: blacks, women (black women) and the poor.

Any social organization or individual committed even for just a little bit to human rights, or better, with human life, has had its work and its anxiety redoubled in this civilization crisis that Brazil is going through. My work is for the commons, for the life. But the cloud that has installed itself and shows no signs of progress is a cloud of death. And in Brazil that death has a face, race, social class.

Not to say that I did not speak of flowers: those who hold the wave are the countless networks of solidarity and reciprocity that already existed or are now born, and independent and peripheral media collectives, which tell the stories that need to be told. Stand with us. More than never we need global solidarity.

Georgia Nicolau, Director at Instituto Procomum, lab.procomum.org

photo: Andrey Haag